Colin Crawford. London: Pluto Press, 2003, £14.99, p/back When World-in-Action and Tribune journalist David Boulton published his excellent book, The UVF, 1966-73, (Torc Books, 1974) he bemoaned a near absence of valuable books and journal articles on Loyalism. In contrast to their Republican counterparts, Loyalists do not have a substantive support base overseas; nor […]
[…] Sunday Times. They aren’t. And even on a quick skim those extracts are clearly dubious. Wright’s account of an unwilling MI5 having James Angleton’s paranoia about Harold Wilson thrust upon it wouldn’t withstand an afternoon’s research by any of the journalists who have so enthusiastically recycled Wright’s allegations. And are we really to believe […]
Are raw prawns pink? Fun and games Down Under where a great brouhaha developed over allegations that Australia’s most famous – and left-wing historian, the late Manning Clark, was a Soviet agent. It started when the Australian poet Sid Murray reported that 26 years before he had seen Clark at a dinner wearing the Order […]
[…] Robin Whittaker (in particular), Rom, Jane Affleck, Terry Hanstock, anon in Dubai, Chris Tame, Robert Henderson, Peter Watson and David Turner for information. Thanks to Chris Gordon- Wilson for a donation of £50. This is a belting good issue, in my view, with a wide variety of top-drawer material – but I tend to […]
Editorially First, most important, our thanks to those Lobster subscribers who responded to our appeal for money. Your response, and a bit of ‘consulting’ with Fleet St. on the content of Lobster 11, has halved our debts. We shall survive. It is tempting to say something about the developing crisis re the Wilson-MI5 story (Lobstergate?). […]
Introduction The mid 1970s was not a good time to be a social democratic ally of the United States. In Britain we had “the Wilson plots’; in Australia Gough Whitlam, Jim Cairns and the Australian Labour Party got Governor Kerr and the CIA; in Germany Willi Brandt resigned after a “security scandal’; in New […]
Who’s kidding whom? The September issue of Fortean Times carried a five page article by Robert Irving, ‘The Henry X File’, about Armen Victorian. It was a very strange article, part profile, part smear job. Armen was ‘twice reportedly seen in the back of a Soviet embassy limousine in Ottowa… rumours associated with the deadly […]
[…] 6 Apr 1939. P.R.O. ECG1/19, October 1939. Documents on German Foreign Policy (hereafter DGFP), Series D vol. VI, pp. 977-83, Wohltat’s minute of conversations with Sir Horace Wilson, Sir Joseph Ball and Robert Hudson, 24 Jul 1939; Documents and Material Relating to the Outbreak of the Second World War, vol.2, pp. 67-72, Dirksen’s report […]
[…] and what they had to tell us about the state’s activities in Northern Ireland and the UK; and related to that are a couple about the wider ‘Wilson plots’. And the basic question which runs through Lobster and this book – how much interference from the secret state, or secret states, has there been? […]
A guided democracy The following appeared in the Daily Telegraph 23 June 2003. ‘Edward Heath created a secret government propaganda unit to persuade the British people to accept the Common Market. Civil servants were engaged in a dirty tricks department of the Foreign Office to cover up the threat to sovereignty and provide rapid rebuttal […]
